Many years ago I conducted WSS. The college I was teaching part time at anounced we were doing WSS. Great, my fave, I thought. I then realised that Ianto would not be conducting it, nor Beth so it would be me. I was WAY out of my depth but gathered the good local players together, had one band call and off we went. There was one number (I honestly cannot remember which) that was a slow 3. In the band call I gave the option of a slow three or to count in quavers rather than crotchets and beat 6. We decided and I naively thought they would remember. Come the first night we hit that number. I had a 3 week baby at home and was undergoing extreme sleep depravation. I beat in and half the band were where they should be and half were rushing ahead on double time. It took me 4 bars to work out what was happening and stop the number, announce I was beating whatever I was beating and start again.
Some years later we did it again. By then we had started the music tech course. So had to use our in house students who were a bunch of guitarists/bassists/drummers. I had the whole WSS score as midi files so hit the tab option in Logic and made arrangements. I had a piano part on CD underscoring it. Just for security. The whole pit were monitoring on cans and I had a student doing playback and running foldback in the pit. He got stoned and turned the CD off at the end of the segue into the finale of the first act. There was a huge rall into the final song and he presumed it was over. The music stopped at 2:36 (or something) into the track. There was zero chance he could find the cue. I frantically looked at the score and hissed at the pit keys player to give me a cue note. I started singing solo while the cast caught up with what was happening. There was a huge amount of adrenalin floating around. The cast picked it up and did the whole number acapella. How we laughed. A few months afterwards.
The Rumble was done as a version of the Vai/Corea one. The players lapped it up and we had a ball. I cannot imagine being stupid/brave enough to try this now. We had about 10 guitarists, 3 bassists and 3 drummers. It was absolutely epic.